What Do Photographers Do on a Daily Basis?
Day in the life of Frankie The Creative.
People see the end product of photographers’ work all the time. Every single day. Whether it’s your Mac’s desktop background, a piece of art hanging in a frame at your workplace, in the magazine you’re perusing through at your local cafe sipping on an oat latte or in a brand campaign on Instagram.
And it goes without saying, there’s a lot more that goes into the process than click, done, push. But you know that. I’m going to walk you through what a week looks like for Frankie and Lewis.
Monday
First thing, every morning - emails. Can’t escape it. And to be honest, we appreciate getting emails. It means people value, and are engaged with, us and our business. Given Mondays are an important day for us in the gallery delivery cycle - we only respond in the morning to emails that are of the up-most priority.
Lewis’ indoor team - Scunners - prior to choking in the final.
We’ve finished a full weekend of events and parties - Friday nights are corporate, birthdays and engagements, Saturdays tend to be weddings or engagement parties, baptisms and hens parties on Sundays. So with our files transferred and backed up from SD cards to hard drives, we’ll have coffees in hand, and up early, as we have files to deliver today. We’d have already delivered our Friday shoots, with 24-48 hour turnaround (apart from weddings and commercial gigs). So the Saturday events will be a priority first thing in the morning.
So let me walk you through the process of files. We have sorted out our folder structure as so:
Client’s event
RAW
LIGHTROOM
EDITED
SOCIAL
This allows for us to dump images, set up an individual Lightroom catalogue for this client, have edited photos on their own - and have images ready to share for marketing purposes. All in separate folders for ease of access.
We make selections using Photo Mechanic - software that allows quicker viewing of images than Lightroom. Import images into Lightroom, make edits and export. We then upload to our gallery provider, Pixieset and send the gallery to our clients.
We’ll then reply to all other emails that we haven’t already first thing. Mondays tend to be our big shoot confirmation day, where we’ll send out emails to shoots for this week.
We wouldn’t tend to get to too many other things on a Monday after our big delivery day.
We would post to socials after going through so many galleries, and picking out our favourite images from a single gallery.
Lewis has indoor football Monday night and Frankie will do yoga, either via Skype or in-class once classes resume.
Tuesday
Emails in the morning and in the afternoon. Let me expand. The type of emails we send and reply to are enquiries through our contact form, payment receipts, liaison regarding direction from clients (mostly commercial/branding), business development, shoot confirmations etc.
One of those is an active part of our week as well, business development. That’s researching and making contacts. In COVID times, that looks a bit differently, but getting coffee/gin is always prefered. This tends to be spread throughout the week. Daily.
We finish editing and sending galleries from Sunday shoots if we didn’t get to them on Monday.
Again, something we do daily, but will definitely go over on Tuesday is reconciling our accounting platform, Xero. That’s checking payments against invoices, and sending receipt of payment to our clients, which confirms their booking. This brings me also to a daily occurrence, capturing and importing receipt of payments we make for our business.
Lewis has football training and Frankie tends to watch a film or TV series.
Wednesday
How’s the swing on Frankie?
What keeps us on task is our Trello workflow/to-do list. We prioritise tasks on both of our lists and prioritise with adjustments based on our and client needs. The way we tackle this is by doing what’s easiest first to kick quick goals and create momentum to get everything else done.
Wednesdays, we like to get our blog pieces done, from shoots on the weekend, through the week or more informative pieces like these. It shows our most recent work or what we’re thinking about. This keeps relevancy and content marketing pieces to help promote our business through socials, search engines and word of mouth marketing. Similarly, this helps us maintain and update our website and the portfolio of images that demonstrates our work.
We track our website’s performance through Google Analytics and Search Console nearly daily, seeing the ebbs and flows of traffic to the site, analysing what resonates with our audience.
Throughout the working week, we tend to have a bit of downtime, given a lot of our work as Adelaide event photographers is on weekends, or at night. So, we get sucked into our hobbies - playing golf, running, reading, cooking, playing video games yada yada.
Furthered, it’s Wednesdays/Thursdays, in the lead up to the weekend, that we’ll get our haircut - before our busiest time of the week - the weekend.
Thursday
Thursdays are a good day for us to check in on our gear, prior to the rush of the weekend. Ensuring that our camera and flash batteries and steady-rig are all charged. We’re ensuring SD cards are formatted to have a clear card. Lenses are cleaned. Sorting out camera bags if we’re at separate shoots.
If we require any other gear ahead of the shoot - spare batteries - different props or whatnot - we’ll do that by today.
Also ahead of organising for the weekend and preparing our business presentation - something that may not be considered - cleaning our cars. We travel to a lot of our client’s homes for their shoots, events and portraits - so rocking up with a dirty car would never be an appropriate action for us.
Thursdays we’re making sure our laundry’s done so we have our clothes ready for any shoots we may have the next day.
Friday
(let’s call this shoot day for brevity for Saturday and Sunday also)
Speaking of the next day, Friday’s tend to be the start to what we actually do in terms of what you think photography is.
We really start getting ready for going to a shoot a few hours before the event. We’ll start going over the brief again, double/triple checking time and location (which we’ve already checked in the morning). We’ll check travel time, looking to be 10 minutes early, and accounting for that time.
Clothes are being ironed.
Double-checking and testing equipment.
Having a feed prior to the shoot - and hydrating/caffeinating up.
Downloading podcasts if it’s a long drive to McClaren Vale or Barossa Valley.
An old kit bag of ours after a shoot.
But also trying to get a bit of downtime if time allows for it - events can be rapid and full-on (not always, but sometimes) - so slowing down and calming the mind prior to shooting is an important step for both of us so we can best capture every moment (micro and macro) possible.
Prior to the time we should be leaving to be early, we’ll double-check to see if there have been any changes to travel time on Google Maps - and make adjustments if necessary.
Let’s consider this shoot as a brand event a la this Friday night.
As we’re both shooting this event (Frankie photo/Lewis video), we keep the kit bag as is - add a steady-rig and tripod for video and head off together.
We meet with the client if they’re there, or the contact at the shoot. And go over who’s who in the zoo as well as a rerun through the brief with any small adjustments if any client-side.
We do the business - shoot shoot shoot.
We interact, we engage.
We change aperture, ISO, shutter speed, frame rates. Changeover batteries and/or SD cards. Change up the camera lens if necessary. Switch up from steady-rig to tripod.
Most importantly, we make sure that our client is looked after.
Say our goodbyes.
Rest. Well - dump files and charge batteries to go again the next day. And then rest.
Some nights we’ll make our quick selections as the shots are fresh in our mind and it’s that bit easier to run through it. Doesn’t make too much difference though.
Saturday
Do it all again.
But we may have to dump files and charge batteries twice with morning/noon shoots and evening shoots.
If it’s a quieter Saturday - we’ll edit Friday’s galleries.
Sundays
Ditto Saturday.
Need to have delivered Friday galleries.
Emails again if we’ve had a busy Friday afternoon and Saturday.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT.
That’s more or less what photographers do daily. We don’t work 9-5 jobs (for the most part - some may be in-house). We work odd hours - but there’s flow and some routine in this profession. It’s best to be organised with tools like Trello, Xero, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, Squarespace, Meta (Facebook) Business Suite and analogue tools like a whiteboard fridge magnet and post-it notes. Without organisation - our sometimes chaotic lifestyle would be overwhelming and just too much.
If you’re looking to become a photographer or interested in learning more about what photographers do, contact us at Frankie The Creative. Or connect with Frances and Lewis on LinkedIn.